The Ancient Machine Found in a Pennsylvania Coal Seam — The Lenape Said It Was Left Behind

#History #Ancient
In October 1902, a crew deepening a heading in a coal mine at Yatesboro, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, broke through the floor of the Lower Kittanning seam into a sealed chamber. The walls were smooth. Inside lay a machine of dark, unrusted iron, fifty-eight feet from tip to tip — a spiral cone at each end, a crown of upright bars around its waist, three toothed rings as tall as three men. The foreman wrote that he had no trade name for it. Within nine days, the company closed the heading.

The coal seam carries the name of a Lenape town on the Allegheny River. And the Lenape had their own account of what was left beneath it. In 1819, the missionary John Heckewelder recorded the Lenape memory of the Alligewi, a people "remarkably tall and stout" who built walls of earth. In 1907, an elder at Moraviantown described to anthropologist M. R. Harrington something with two mouths and three toothed wheels, put to sleep facing the water, under the black stone — still cold.

This documentary follows six records: a foreman's ledger, a trapper boy's tape, an elder's words, a state inspector's report from 1923, the Seneca memory of the Stone Coats, and three files that went missing. They never met. They describe the same thing.

What was it facing the water for?

This documentary examines historical records, archaeological research, and Indigenous oral traditions. It presents documented findings alongside long-standing questions that remain open. Where accounts differ, both are presented. Nothing here is offered as a settled conclusion.


By https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o_NjGMp0Zo